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Chambered Music. An Evolution of Sound

Beginning in the late 1980s we've added chambering to our list of sound tweaking tools—and when the Artist model was launched it became mainstream with us. Those early examples of hollowed-out guitars were just solid body instruments with a pocket (or holes) cut into the mahogany back and then covered by the maple top. The Artist added the f-hole, but it wasn't until after we'd made the move to New Hartford that we really started taking the whole chambering thing to a new level. Of course, the Newport and the Improv were logical extensions of our quest, but let's concern ourselves with the semi-solid guitars for this post.
 

 

Our first change was to modify the Studio's chamber size and add the undercarve to the top. Most chambered guitars (including the original Artist models) are hollow underneath but only arched on the outside. By getting the dimension of the top over the chamber down to a consistent thickness we were able to gain some amplitude and noticeably shift the resonance of the guitar. This led to more experimentation with shape and size.
 

The Talladega is the most obvious recipient of the data that we collected—its horn-shaped form and rounded corners serve to reduce standing waves.
 

Talladega Pro Chambering

 

It's exactly the same thing speaker enclosure builders do. Our collaborations with fellow luthiers and aerospace engineers brought us up to speed on several important fronts. An in-house laser vibrometer was at our disposal as well. It's a device that lets you take a "movie" in real time of the vibration patterns on the surface of the instrument. Pretty cool stuff. In the end, the techie tricks only served to attach hard numbers to what we were learning by ear.
  

Talladega first sketch

In the case of the Talladega, we were trying to tailor the sound of the guitar to accentuate the articulation of the notes without becoming too hard or harsh. The Double-D pickup concept was going to have plenty of mids, but we wanted the guitar to be capable of the kind of twang that country and roots rock players could dig. Also, the Tally is capable of combining the two pickups in series for a big humbucking sound, but we didn't want the bottom to wash out either. The Talladega Pro is somewhat different in that it supplies a warmer, darker tone for players who are jumping to humbuckers from bolt-on Strat-type guitars. I think that in both cases, we've succeeded.

Another instrument that has benefitted from our attention to chambering is the Standard. We'd made some hollowed-out versions, mostly to reduce weight for clients, but we hadn't really attempted to "tune" it in the process. Clearly, weight was becoming an issue for some customers but we wanted to offer more as long as we were at it. 

The first version prototypes used various locations and sizes of chambers, but the thing that we kept running into was that when the chambers got big, the feedback got uncontrollable and unpredictable. What a surprise—any Jazz-box player could have foretold that. It was becoming clear that a series of smaller chambers was going to be the ticket, but just when we thought we'd got it right another problem surfaced. The Standard is a big instrument and it's relatively thin. The body is made from a single piece of mahogany and is already prone to warpage. On a smaller guitar you might not notice it, but over the wingspan of the Standard it was becoming a problem. The solution came from an unusual source.

Improv top bracing 

Over the years we've been involved with developmental luthierie with our friends and partners in the acoustic world which includes the study of bracing patterns and top stiffness. Hundreds of deflection tests and dozens of brace pattern changes must have engraved themselves into my subconcious. What we came up with is an "X" brace pattern that maintains the stiffness of the instrument's body in all directions while yielding a weight loss of about 1.4 pounds on average. The series of small chambers of varying size reduces the tendency of any single resonance to get out of control at higher volumes, yet the response time to pick attack is noticeably heightened. It looks a little like fish bones.

Standard chambering

In the end it worked so well, we've made it a "permanent" change. Well, as permanent as anything at Hamer is I guess. For the purists who want that original deep, heavy resonance of the original, we still offer that too.

SuperPro Guitar on the Level

Just a quick post at the end of another busy day. As I passed through the finishing area I caught Todd on the leveling bench with a custom order Monaco SuperPro. If you look closely, you'll see that it's just a little different than stock.

We'll have to turn back the clock on this one and give you a full rundown on the build and the back-story soon. 

Neck Blend Completed

It's lunchtime here in New Hartford, and it has been a busy morning. Dave has finished the neck blend on the Standard model and with a new coat of pore filler it's up on the rack to dry for two days.

 Looks pretty nice doesn't it? This one is getting a bit of an unusual paint job, but that's for another day. Now it's time to finish eating and get back to work.

Morning Blend

Starbucks' ain't got nothin' on our man Dave. He's up with the roosters and in the shop before the sun comes over the mountain to the east. He's already working on the neck blend that he started on Friday and he's determined to finish it up. He's got it roughed out with the scraper and files to the point that it's all about the hand sanding. 

 He's got it down to about a 220 grit right now so it's slow going. He just keeps running his well-trained fingertips over the surface to identify any inconsistencies in the shape—then he sands a little more. This ain't his first rodeo folks, so he knows where he's going by braille. 

We'll stop back a little later to see how he does.

Week-end Wrap-up

It has been a very hectic week here in New Hartford and the weather has been crazy too. Yesterday it hit 67 degrees here, which is pretty insane seeing how it is supposed to snow tonight! 

Dave is making good progress on the Kahler-equipped Standard—here's the blended neck joint after being roughed out with a spindle sander.

 The rest of the blend will be done with sandpaper, taking in excess of an hour to complete. Quite amazing when you compare it with the time it takes to bolt on a neck. You can see the area he's working on from its different color. That's because the guitar was already pore-filled which darkens the wood. The lighter area is where the raw mahogany is exposed.

About twenty five feet from Dave's bench Todd has a Standard 12-string bass up on the leveling bench. This one has a quilt maple top that has been finished in our transparent black. It's a difficult finish to get exactly right. For the longest time I wasn't happy with the hues that black stains used to achieve their "black." But after lots and lots of experimenting, we've hit upon a solution that looks exactly right.

 Our process avoids the "dirtiness" in the pores that you see on inexpensive jobs. Another nice touch on this instrument is the matching headstock overlay which turned out rather well. The ivoroid binding really sets it off too.

We use a double truss rod arrangement on these 34" basses to counteract the tension of twelve strings and allow twist control as well. Todd is about to hand sand the headstock with a smooth block in order to get the finish dead flat.

A quick look inside the spray booth finds some "stock" models in progress—a Monaco III, another Standard a pair of Talladegas and a Monaco. There's always something cooking, but everything will have to simmer over the weekend while we chillax. See you next week!

 

Workshop Wednesday

A quick scan of The Workshop on a busy Wednesday reveals more than a few projects underway. The guys are as busy as Santa's elves, moving steadily along with our clients' dream guitars. At one end of the shop Todd has just finished buffing a Standard model built from African Limba and finished off with a golden yellow "Korina" lacquer.

 
Wait a minute! What's up with that? Left-handed Standards always take me back to the very first time I saw this shape. The familiarity of the form is temporarily suspended and It's almost as if I'd never seen one before. 

This particular instrument was ordered with tortoise shell binding, and it's a great combination with the color of the guitar. Todd is now methodically assembling all the hardware, which is gold-plated, before moving on to the wiring bench. Each step of the way our guys are careful to take all the time the job requires and they don't rush anything.

A few steps away Dave is prepping a neck joint on another custom Standard. Tom has just finished the neck which features a maple fingerboard. Gary put a few light coats of nitro on the fingerboard before the frets were inserted, and now Dave is ready to join the two parts.

 

Regular readers will have seen our video of how we fit each neck in a precise way that can only be done by hand. The neck socket on the body is undersized, and in this case it's Dave who will open it up to fit the neck perfectly. But wait... there's more!

Here's the dry fit, and look... it's a Kahler trem! Yes folks, we still do 'em just like yester-year. I've still got my favorite Pepto-pink Kahler-quipped Chaparral with a built-in Nady transmitter. That thing rocks! 

Well, enough of my yakkin' let's turn it up to eleven and get these people their guitars. The holiday break is almost upon us.

 

NightFire Talladega on the Wing

After a nice Thanksgiving break, we're back in the workshop and doing damage like always. There are lots of fun projects in house right now, some of which we'll be looking at shortly. But right now, let's roll the clock back to just before the holiday. Our Talladega with the NightFire finish was being buffed out and then assembled on Todd's bench.

 In went the Double-D pickups, four-way switch, volume and tone controls.

In this shot  you can see the matching headstock overlay—a slice of the same maple that's on the top of the guitar, and the abalone faceplate inlay. Even the tiny "USA" inlays are individual pieces! This order called for Schaller tuners, still the highest quality, hands-down. Our client wanted some impressive binding, and Dave came through in a big way. It's hard to do properly, laying each strip on  over the next, but that's the way we do it, instead of using pre-laminated plastic with the stripes already in them.

Next, Todd hand wired the electrical components, all of which have been specially sourced to our specifications. Old-school cloth covered wire, custom-taper potentiometers by CTS, and the Sprague "orange drop" capacitor get hooked up inside the control cavity using lead-free solder. The whole deal is sprayed with a nickel based shielding paint that we import from Belgium—it's the best there is. After sealing things up with our anodized aluminum back plate door, Todd cut the nut and strung it up.

 

In the set-up room we set the action, neck relief (.010" at the 8th fret) and then play test the guitar for a while. It's at this point that pickup heights can be set to balance the tone and output. I like to put the neck pickup down a bit lower than usual on the bass side with the Double-Ds. This cleans up the bottom end and keeps it from being too flubby. At the same time keeping the strings close on the higher strings fattens them up relatively. The bridge pickup has quite a bit of magnetic pull due to the large alnico polepieces and a large copperplated steel plate underneath—that how it gets its ultra-twang. You have to be careful not to get it too close to the strings or ghost tones can occur, which make the guitar hard to intonate.

 

Here's a nice shot of the ivory nut and the abalone Victory inlay at the first fret, another nice option. Todd has done a great job slotting the ivory. We use a graduated spacing that gets wider as the strings get thicker. Your fingertips feel the space between the strings, so our method evens that out as opposed to evenly spacing the centers. The result is the trademark Hamer feel that makes this Talladega such a joy to play right out of the box.

Speaking of playing, our covert cam caught a little set-up room jamming just before it went into the aforementioned box. Enjoy!

 

This Wheel's On Fire

Todd has finished blocking out the Nightfire Talladega and has it on the wheel this morning. He started the third and final sanding with 400p sandpaper, and gradually reduced the grit step by step  until he finished up with a micron paper that leaves the lacquer hazy but almost glossy. The next step is to use a yellow Menzerna buffing compound on a cotton wheel.

 

 We use an 18" diameter wheel with an rpm of 1100. We calculate Todd's "feed" speed at about 25 ft/min. which gives us a face speed of about 5200 ft/min. By listening to the sound of the wheel against the work, Todd can vary his pressure accordingly to control heat buildup. Typically, we see a temperature of about 150 degrees F. By heating the lacquer, we're actually moving it around and smoothing out the scratches. Too much pressure and the finish will melt and ripple when it cools. Not enough pressure and the haze doesn't burn off.

In about an hour Todd will be ready to go to the hand polish and seal the finish. We'll wait a couple of days to see how the finish settles out before going back to do our final inspection and final wax. It won't be long now!

Quilting for Comfort on a Cold Day

It's getting cold here in rural New England, witnessed by the field jackets stuffing the coat rack just inside the workshop door. Inside, it's warm and a pleasant humidity—perfect for guitar building. Just the same, if Tom feels a little chill, he can cover up with a nice quilt like this one. Now doesn't that warm your heart?

 

If this wood looks familiar, it's because the maple top is from a nice batch from the same tree that yielded the one Tom made a few weeks back. If you are the new owner of this guitar now you know that there's a fraternal twin sister out there someplace. Will they ever meet?

Wednesday Workshop Custom 12 String Bass

As the mornings get darker and the air gets chillier, we find the guys engrossed in their work. Dave is putting the string nut blank on the twelve-string bass that we saw earlier.

We use a black material that we call Lubritrak. It's a tough, slippery material that allows the strings to glide smoothly through the slots. We pioneered the idea of a self-lubricating nut with the introduction of this material in the early 1980s. It works great for tremolo guitars too.

After he bonds it down, Dave will file the nut blank to the proper width, height and shape. The next step is to stamp the serial number into the back of the headstock with a press. Dave gets the next available number from the book and loads the press with the stamping dies.

As Dave pulls the lever down firmly, the dies press the number into the wood. In this case, it's a maple neck. The second line will be the letters U. S. A. because that's what we're all about. 

The bass is now well on its way, but some of you are probably wondering what this twelve-string bass business is all about.

Thirty Two years ago, bassist Tom Peterson threw in the towel trying to get his Hagstrom 8-string bass to function properly. Cheaply made, with only four bridge saddle for eight strings and a thin, flexible neck, it just wasn't cutting it for Tom. When he approached us, first to improve the Hagstrom, then to build a replacement—we thought it was a fine idea. When things escalated to twelve strings, we had our doubts. 

Tom's idea was to create an instrument based upon the ancient Tiple—a guitar-like instrument with four courses of three strings each. Each course, or group, would have a standard bass string as the root and two more strings tuned in unison one octave higher. Tom's band, Cheap Trick was basically a trio with a singer, and the big sound he anticipated would be perfect to fill things up and act as a de-facto rhythm guitar as well as a bass.

The Tiple made its way here from Spain by way of Columbia as early as the sixteenth century. Tiples were made by many builders in the US such as Martin (pictured above) and Regal, in the early part of the last century. To be honest, we thought that the force of twelve strings on a bass would compromise the neck. We negotiated Tom down to Ten strings for the first whack at it. The plan was to triple the top two courses and use the standard eight-string, double configuration for the lower two courses.

Thus, in 1977, the first Hamer multi-string bass was developed and built. It wasn't as easy as just going out and buying the parts—they had to be made. I designed a bridge and tailpiece based upon the Thunderbird hardware, but with eight individual saddles so that Tom could intonate the octave strings separately from the low ones. I found a guy with a small machine shop to help make it, and then drove it over to the chrome plater down the road. These are still the guys who make them today! The bridge was a major improvement over original eight string. Incidentally, we constructed an eight-string electric mandocello for Rick Nielsen at the same time, and here's a photo of the two instruments together at the time of completion.

Tom took that first ten-string on the road, and when it stood up to the rigors of touring, it was time to make the world's first twelve-string bass. But that wouldn't even be enough for Tom, but that's a story for another time.

More Keb' 'n' Monaco

Couldn't resist showing this surprise inside the new Keb' Mo' CD. Now I've got to get back to work.

Monday... So Many Possibilities

Some folks dread Monday, but not us in The Workshop. As the beautiful New England fall sunrise burns the fog off the sparkling river outside our shop door, we're reminded of the possibilities we're handed each week. Can't wait to see what's in store.

Here's the fly fishing nirvana just outside our window—like living in a watercolor painting.

Greg V Talladega Video Clip

One of the driving forces behind the development of the Talladega was friendship with and admiration of Greg V. The original concept (which became the Talladega Pro) got sidelined as I took the project into different territory to suit Greg's playing style. Here, he demonstrates a fraction of what that guitar is capable of.

Greg and I have talked about doing some additional clips to demo the Tally, let's hope we can get to that soon. In the meantime, enjoy the atmospherics!

Hamer Monaco Graces Keb' Mo' CD Cover

Regular readers of this blog will recall Keb' Mo's visit to the workshop. He'd already been a convert to Hamer, having comissioned a pair of Monacos after his first taste of a Korina Newport.

 

Originally outfitted with Lollar P90s, Keb found the noise level a little too much for his taste so he upgraded the guitar with a set of hum-cancelling Duncans. It didn't take long for "Big Red" to become his main stage and recording guitar.

To our delight we discovered that Keb' has a new CD out featuring some live tracks as well as new studio material. We're certainly flattered to see "Big Red" on the album cover too!

 

Thanks buddy, we're proud to be a part of your team. 

Tone in the Ear of the Beholder

Tone could be one of the most misused words in the guitar lexicon. It's a word that gets thrown around to describe any number of attributes of a guitar's (or guitarist's) sound. "Oh, he's got great tone." I'm sure you've said it yourself, but did you really know what you were talking about? Is it the touch, the attack or the bloom? Is it the balance and relative amplitude of the different frequencies—or is it all of the above and more?

Even more frustrating can be the fact that not everyone hears things the same way. I think Robert Cray has a great sound, but you think he sounds thin and weak. Who is right? Well, that's easy, I'm right—but that's another story. One can only imagine the amount of energy required to archive and serve the number words of internet babble about Clapton's "Woman Tone" or Peter Green's out of phase sound on old Fleetwood Mac recordings. 

Here's a funny little thing that occurred as we were filming Jon Herington's video segments. Jon was demonstrating how the neck pickup sound on his Talladega Pro was so fat that he used the EQ on his Tube Screamer, not to add distortion, but to cut the bass and add clarity to the notes. As he played the "undesirable" sound of the guitar unmodified, I noted that a lot of players would like to get such a sound. "It doesn't work for me" was his reply, as he forged ahead with his explanation of how he changes it to fit into the Steely Dan format. Take a look:

One of the things you can take away from this is that even a great sound may not be appropriate in every setting. Of course, I'd take it one step further and say that any sound can be used in the right place. This probably comes from spending a lot of time in the studio, dissecting mixes and adding overdubs. You learn very quickly that there's not a lot of room for big sounds once the rest of the band is in the mix. If you listen to "Outside Woman Blues" you'll hear that it's primarily the hook—and the huge holes that the rhythm section leaves for Clapton's fat sound is why, in that case, it works.